Google+ Punts on Kafkaesque Name Policy

One of my favorite moments in Franz Kafka’s The Trial is shortly after the protagonist Josef K is placed under arrest for an unnamed offense. The men notifying him of his arrest don’t cuff him or take him to jail. They just tell him proceedings are underway and that he’ll learn everything in due course.

The only thing K can think to do is present the men his identity papers, but all he can find to show them is his bicycle license: “If this is a farce, he was going to play along.”

That’s what Google’s identity policy for Google+ has felt like over the last weeks: a farce. It has been genuinely Kafkaesque, in the proper darkly comedic sense of the term. (Kafka’s true heir in our times is probably Curb Your Enthusiasm‘s Larry David.)

Almost four weeks ago, at the end of July, we first looked at Google+’s identity policy, after Google’s Bradley Horowitz announced coming changes in enforcement, allowing users whose profiles were flagged for name violations a chance to correct them before suspension. Horowitz also promised further iterations and greater transparency in the future.

Thursday night, Google’s Saurabh Sharma announced the first significant change in the enforcement policy: a four-day grace period between notice of a violation and suspension, during which users can change their profiles to align them with the policy.

So what Google promised weeks ago now has a defined time window. Other than that, very little has changed. There is no clear way for users to flag profiles for name violations other than “Impersonation” or “Fake Profile,” neither of which seems to fit the target case of pseudonyms or nonstandard names.

Without a clear path to redefine its names policy, Google is effectively asking for extra time so it can muddle through.

Meanwhile, in what’s increasingly been dubbed the “Nym Wars,” opponents to Google’s insistence on “real names” on Plus rallied and organized:

“My Name Is Me” became a primary portal, featuring a range of individual stories and general arguments defending the right to pseudonymity and alternative names on social media.

Microsoft Social Media Researcher Danah Boyd added “‘Real Names’ Policies Are an Abuse of Power.” Boyd noted that users of alternative names online are overwhelmingly likely to be members of disempowered groups, and that teens and people of color still frequently use nicknames or handles on Facebook without anyone noticing.

Facebook’s origins in a closed network of Ivy League college students encouraged a culture of real names. That foundation helped it normalize that convention when it further opened up. Google+ opened initially to a vocal post-collegiate tech-savvy community, many of whom didn’t like Facebook and who had well-established conventions for using handles on online forums, Twitter and gaming sites. Naturally, this provoked a vocal backlash when Google tightened things up to make things more like Facebook.

Following Boyd’s look at multicultural naming norms, AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes zeroed in on how Facebook uses “soft power” to encourage use of real names: “Users who choose to go by their commonly used names are probably more likely to have a full Facebook experience, simply because more people they know will find them and interact with them.”

The Atlantic‘s Alexis Madrigal thinks Facebook and Google’s approach to naming isn’t just radical for online communities, but for any community. “[I]n real life, we expect very few statements to be public, persistent, and attached to your real identity. Basically, only people talking on television or to the media can expect such treatment. And even then, the vast majority of their statements don’t become part of the searchable Internet.” (For a skeptical take on this claim, see Alan Jacobs’ response).

The potential for these security breaches are one reason Google affirmed its commitment to supporting anonymous, pseudonymous and fully identified profiles in February. It hasn’t extended a similarly multitiered approach to Google+, even though its Circles architecture for limiting sharing would seem to allow it, or even imply it.

Kirrily “Skud” Robert is an ex-Google employee and one of the main organizers of the community opposed to the name policy. I interviewed her shortly after my first story on Google’s name policy and have kept in touch since.

Skud goes both by her online handle and what she calls her “wallet name.” She says Google’s policy permits names different from what’s on your government ID if it’s what people generally call you in “real life” (the so-called “Lady Gaga” exception). If your profile is suspended for a names violation, Google typically asks for either a government ID or a link to a profile on another social network with a similarly strict naming policy. Like Facebook.

“Google was not surprised by this; Google knew this was coming.” Skud says that something on the order of 1,000 employees at Google warned that the naming policy was flawed prior to Google+’s launch but were ignored.

“They’re so scared of this idea that ‘Google sucks at social,'” she says, after what happened with Buzz and Wave, that “they’re just copying Facebook’s names policy and hoping it’ll work for them too.”

The biggest problem with Google’s identity policy has always been that’s it’s essentially unenforceable. You can’t police millions of users with algorithms looking for nonstandard characters in names or reviewing user-flagged profiles with enough sensitivity to handle edge cases without devoting an absurd number of employee hours to review every violation. By all accounts, Google hasn’t assigned such resources.

Because there’s no way to specifically flag a name violation to distinguish it from spam or impersonation or general abuse. Add that to the fact that business and media accounts started landing on Google+ before separate business profiles were established, and you get mass purges that can be indiscriminate.

“No one actually gets a notification saying what users are being suspended for,” Skud said. “People are being suspended for spam or abuse or other reasons that trigger a total shutdown of Google services.… Name violations are used for griefing. I’m pretty sure it was a griefer who shut me down after I complained about the pseudonym policy, because I was using a pseudonym.”

Facebook’s Blake Ross, for example, was briefly booted from Google+ for an undisclosed community violation for a profile under his own name. It was most likely because of a griefing attack, or someone trying to pester Facebook employees on Google+ for a joke.

“Google could have done this so much better,” Skud laments. “They know how to handle spam in SEO or e-mail. This would have been a great opportunity to use their quite frankly brilliant algorithmic tools and all the data that they have to come up with a way to manage online reputation and identity that would be the equal of PageRank.”

Google+ is already something of a nerd magnet, so many people on Google+ have ideas (including full schema) on how Google should handle names. I’ve endorsed an approach I call “polynymy,” letting each user choose a range of names, nicknames, alternative names or handles that they can use within different circles.

For instance, if Google+ is going to do social gaming, I would much rather game under a self-chosen handle than “Tim Carmody, Wired.com.” (Can you imagine the shame when strangers start beating me at online Scrabble?)

But that doesn’t solve the problem that Google, which has never requested or demanded full names from us before to use any of its services, is asking for names now. Even if you could control exactly who sees which of your identities in which contexts, Google would still have access to them all. That’s a privacy risk, a security risk and a huge grab for personal data to be held by one company.

When Google+ first rolled out, I was surprised by how little of Google’s algorithmic firepower it employed. From friend recommendations to sparks to manual circle and sharing management, Google put most of the burden on manual user decisions.

Then, I thought Google was trying to avoid alarming people if it automated too much of the process. It might make users think that Google already had all your personal information and that it was making these decisions for you. Instead of an uncanny personalization algorithm, it was putting users directly in charge.

I’ve also written about the commercial upside of a unified identity for buying things online or selling information or access to advertisers. And I’ve heard that some high-level Googlers just like the internet better when everyone uses their real names; it’s a gut feeling they have that things go better, everyone is nicer, and so forth. Now, though, I wonder if it’s something even simpler than that.

I think Google, by asking for real names for its profiles, wants to be the only portal you use (and the primary source of data you trust) to find information about people when you search for them by name. (I can’t tell whether this is simple or profound.)

Google has the data, and it knows the history. At one point in the history of the web, people made homepages about themselves. Then they began writing blogs. Now, the best source of contacts, biographical data and work information for most people are social networks. Type anyone’s name into Google and wait for auto-complete: The first alternate suggestions that come up are typically “Firstname Lastname Facebook” or “Firstname Lastname Twitter.”

Name searches are very popular. If Bing and Facebook or anyone else used social network data to consistently provide more relevant search results for names (or businesses, etc.), Google’s lead in search doesn’t look so rock solid any more. It would only be a matter of time.

Google needs your real name. And the best way it it has to justify that demand is by insisting that everyone use it and show it to everyone else, too. At least, until they can figure out what to do next.

I hope they do. For me, at least, pluralism, inclusion and listening to user feedback are a competitive advantage when it comes to social media. This farce has to end eventually.